Benjamin Fenster

Software Developer

WebCT Tools

As a teaching assistant and a student I've had to use WebCT quite a
bit. I don't like it. Not a lot of thought went into the user
interface and there are more than a few bugs. Once, when attempting
to download students' assignments to grade, WebCT instead offered me a
.zip file with WebCT's own Perl source code. It's not a good piece of
software.

I, of course, am not one to stand idly by and use bad software, so
I've created workarounds for the things I didn't like. Back before it
was possible to download whole dropboxes as a .zip file I built a tool
to do that. Instead of refreshing my browser constantly to find new
discussion posts I built a tool to alert me of any changes. Instead
of waiting for a dropbox to close before downloading an assignment, I
built a tool to do it in advance.